Maker Faire Meets Silicon Valley

SAN MATEO, Calif. — The chief executive of ARM came to Maker Faire Bay Area where the company had a small booth for the first time this year. Intel had a much larger tent, starring its Quark processor and a young man who demonstrated a marshmallow gun to President Barack Obama.

The archrivals were among many of the top tech companies that had a presence at the event this year, trying to ride the growing grassroots movement dedicated to the joy of democratic design.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon boards powered miniature race cars driven by smartphones. Freescale brought out big nerf guns. Altera showed an FPGA driving a robotic plotter. Sony let kids play with its new prototype for smart blocks. Oracle's Java engineers hosted an informal hackathon and one of the sailors from its World Cup ship.

The usual crew also was on hand. Maker celebrity Massimo Banzi introduced a new Arduino board and design tools. Autodesk CEO Carl Bass talked about his tools -- free to students and teachers -- and showed an electric go-cart he made with his son.

Much of the event continues to focus on introducing kids to the power of electronics. Tech fashion designer Anouk Wipprecht gave away Sparkfun kits to girls and boys.

Everywhere you turned were quadcopters or steampunk vehicles or some sort of 3D printer, including ones making Oreo cookies and pancakes. They were part of the carnival atmosphere, along with a handful of more serious projects, trying to leverage crowdsourced funds into business stardom.

This robotic, steampunk-inspired fire truck is one many icons just inside the entrance to Maker Faire Bay Area.

There was way too much to see for our one day at the event. That said, we saw a lot and heard a few good stories. Take a look on the following pages.

Going through the report I understood what I missed; but thanks to Rick for this wonderful report which enables me to have some glimpses and flavours of the event! Something which makes me joyous that kids had lot many things to play with and that is how more of them would get attracted towards electronics, generating more electronics professionals, hobbyists for future. That was quite encouraging!

The crowd at this event is amazing. The company I work for Praetorian(1) specializes in large events, concerts and such like Maker, Fleet week, Renascence and Dickens Faires. It is truly remarkable that one can get this many folk together an have almost no incidents to speak of.

I worked security this year. Mostly during setup. I got to see people, lots and lots of people. Many whom I knew and others whom I met for the first time.

I must sat that this report here on EETimes really captured the feel of the event. I was next to the octopus when they tested it on Friday. Even at 50 or so feet away one could feel the heat.

Every spare break time I had was spent in the Expo hall checking out some of the items detailed in this report. My favorites were seeing that Meccano has a new owner, the table was covered with the DIY parts to play with. Would have liked more time. Meccano in the US is called Erector Set. A few years ago I wanted to play with these parts (the gears) as an adult engineer again only to find that the then owner had aimed the product at preschool and was to safety concerned. Great to see this is back here in the US.

Other great things were Atmel (Since Atmel is my life as I use AVRs in my pipe organs) OSH-Park, (although I never did find the booth) NASA, And the folk at MAKE who also contribute here. It is times like this I feel I am at the center of the storm of technology. We really are a small community of thousands and it is great that we can get together in person.